Creating more transparency and access
Mentoring Murals celebrates the inter-connectedness we need to create, produce, and showcase public art in neighborhoods. It acknowledges the many hands and different viewpoints it takes to create public art while making the process more transparent. Ultimately, it creates a higher awareness about one another and the places we call home across Boston.
Mentoring Murals began with an inquiry from Greater Grove Hall Main Streets Executive Director, Ed Gaskin. After participating in N+T’s live Zoom conversation “N+T Asks: Grove Hall” with Johnetta Tinker and Larry Pierce in the summer of 2020, Ed reached out with a challenge: how to create innovative murals that, like billboards could be printed and rotated out frequently at a lower cost than painted murals and ultimately create equitable access to contemporary art, especially for artists of color and those who cannot physically create large-scale murals. He saw our “deep expertise in large-scale installations” and asked if we could lead the engineering effort to make the project possible.
We thought Gaskin was on to something — and we had some recommendations for how to make the selection of artists more equitable too — and a relationship of co-learning, trust, and reciprocity began.
According to Gaskin, there was only one work of public art listed by the Boston Arts Commission when he took the helm of GGHMS in 2013. “Learning of the relationship between public art and economic development, and the challenges artists of color have in getting the opportunity to display their work, we set out to change that,” said Gaskin, GGHMS’s Executive Director. “Murals were one way to bring more public art to the community, but they are expensive, permanent, and limited to muralists.”
“Infrastructure is now in place for us to display the best established and emerging artists from a range of styles at a much lower cost.”
ABOUT GREATER GROVE HALL MAIN STREETS
Greater Grove Hall Main Streets is a non-profit focused on the economic and community development and urban planning for the Grove Hall area. As part of its community development, it has brought murals, painted utility boxes, a summer concert series, and is in the process of restoring the iconic clock tower in the heart of Grove Hall. Visit their site for more information on Grove Hall past, present, and future including its history as a center of Jewish Culture, Prince Hall Grand Lodge (the oldest black fraternal organization in North America), and the many attractions that make Grove Hall a vibrant neighborhood.
With special thanks to:
Major funding for Mentoring Murals was provided by the 2020 N+T Accelerator program. Additionally, Boston Main Streets Foundation supported GGHMS’s initial idea to create printed murals.
Further funding for the second and third iterations of Mentoring Murals was provided by Kensington Investment Company amd NEFA’s Public Art for Spatial Justice grant.
